Senator Andrew Bartlett
Sunday, August 07, 2005
 
Give me liberty or give me death
I have a sinking feeling about how the public ‘debate’ around terrorism and security is going to play out and the inevitable power grab that is coming from the federal (and possibly state) governments under the guise of greater community safety.

The square-jawed rhetoric from John Howard – and Tony Blair in the UK – is so patently artificial you almost expect them to have glued some extra hair on their chests before they do their best ‘grim determination and firm resolve’ look for the cameras.

I thought departed NSW Premier Bob Carr had made a strong bid for the most fatuous and inane juxtaposition of the year a few weeks ago when he said “your civil liberty not to have your bag searched is outweighed by my right not to be blown up when I travel on public transport.”

But now John Howard has come up with “The most important civil liberty I have is, and you have, is to stay alive and to be free from violence and death” as his facile riposte to anyone who complains about him ripping away our freedoms under the guise of responding to the terrorist threat.

The sad thing is that these absurd statements, so out of proportion and unconnected to the challenges we face, seem to be accepted without question. All this while the Department that’s actually responsible for overseeing who is allowed to come and go from the country is widely acknowledged as totally dysfunctional.

I guess when our Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, can get away with appealing to United Nation’s Human Rights Conventions to justify taking away our freedoms and giving himself more power, then anything’s possible. Last week he referred to Article 3 of the Convention - ‘everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person’, while somehow managing to ignore the ‘liberty’ part.

Frankly, if the Government was genuine in saying that being ‘free from death’ and ‘staying alive’ outweighs all else, regardless of individual freedom or social or economic cost, then we’d be banning motor cars tomorrow and taking a good hard look at cigarettes, junk food, extreme sports and plenty of other things.

So when the government proposes laws that will enable you to be locked up without charge or even being suspected of a crime for months on end, give uncontrolled power to tap phones, intercept emails and SMS, further restrict privacy and FoI laws, eliminate any judicial or parliamentary oversight of the activities of government security and police agencies, or introduces a national ID card, you’ll know that you'll just have to accept it or it could mean death for us all.

Disagreeing with the government – and the elites in the media who form the cheer squad – will be unpatriotic by definition. If you don’t agree with the Prime Minister that all your freedoms should be removed and total power given to the Government, then you are obviously in favour of people being killed. This means you’re probably a terrorist sympathiser, so you might even need to be locked up to find out what you know. If you’re foreign born, we’ll cancel your visa or your citizenship and kick you out of the country.

If that's the sort of 'logic' that's going to shape the debate in coming months, it's likely to have a bad outcome for our country. There’s bound to be plenty of politicians and media commentators who will take the easy road on this and fall into line with the false dichotomy the Prime Minister and others are setting up. However, I agree with what Graham Young has said in this comment on his blog - “the only answer to terrorism is to reassert our beliefs”. We have to confront intolerance and the deliberate inflaming of ignorance wherever it occurs in our society, not least by media commentators such as Graham describes. If the Prime Minister and all the other hairy-chested leaders were more willing to be tough on all the inflammatory garbage in the media, instead of just the bits said by the odd Muslim cleric, I might take his claims a bit more seriously.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Sunday, August 07, 2005 Permalink
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